In most contemporary articles the future of collaboration is remote workplaces and more natural space, no longer industrial-era centralized brick-and-mortar for assembly-lines and escalators.

However, Berkeley is proudly announcing without any sense of impact at all that they will pave the forest and replace quickly shrinking natural environment in the Bay Area with yet another big building.

What’s even more bizarre, is despite the ever-growing crowd of scientists demanding transparency in data, an absurdly large $252 million in funds to be spent on a building is being announced as… anonymous.

The Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS) will soon have a brick-and-mortar home, thanks to an anonymous $252 million gift to seed the construction of a new “data hub” on the open space… “To ensure these systems and tools are used ethically and responsibly, experts in computing and data science must work closely with ethicists, sociologists, legal scholars and others at every step of the process,” Chayes said. “And for these collaborations to happen, these disparate groups need a space to work together.”

Is the donor Putin? Zuckerberg? A construction company, or an architecture firm?

Nothing so far about the announcement suggests anything close to being ethical or responsible. Did I miss a clue?

I wish it were an article from the Onion, but alas it is real.